By Zaldy Dandan
Variety Editor

Needed: Annual budget hearings

THE vice speaker says a real budget review is in the works up at the Legislature. He indicates that the House of Representatives will conduct extensive hearings and require detailed budget worksheets from the administration so that legislators and the public can review personnel and all others expenses, examine program priorities, justification for expenses, revenue collections and expenditures, and critique the performance of government agencies.
Budget hearings, to be sure, are important processes that have been dispensed with for far too long. In this election year, lawmakers say that they will finally do what they’re supposed to be doing before passing a budget.
But since the government has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to retire its deficits within two years as required by the CNMI Constitution, it may be time to consider a constitutional mechanism that triggers an automatic shutdown of government services if there is no new budget. This mechanism serves the federal government well, forcing lawmakers and the White House to produce a budget every year. If the gargantuan government that the feds have can pass an encyclopedic $2.9 TRILLION budget, surely the commonwealth and its elected officials can come up with annual appropriations that should not even reach $170 million.
Everyone in the community is expecting additional government cuts, but with the cuts comes the need for clearer and more specific details justifying the method and detailing the outcome. The public will want to know, for example, when the government plans on picking up its own payments to the Retirement Fund and the Commonwealth Utilities Corp., thereby relieving consumers of the burden of subsidizing government utility payments.
The administration’s austerity holidays have saved some money, but no one knows exactly how much, and these are the facts that should be extracted during the upcoming budget review (assuming that lawmakers will conduct hearings). Increased CUC rates and surcharges should have yielded savings, but no one knows how much has been “saved” or what the funds have been used for. This, too, should be examined in the budget process. Likewise, the Public School System budget should be reviewed to determine how many teachers are required, and how many students are enrolled. With out-migration at an all time high, many families and, it should follow, many children have left island. What accounts for the increased enrollment in public schools — transfers from private schools?
These are, at any rate, among the many important questions that should be answered in the budget process, whose goal, we repeat, is to give lawmakers and the public a clear understanding of where the government stands financially, as well as an opportunity to affect policy and give direction to how public funds are spent.
There remains the question of how the administration plans on reviving the CNMI economy, arguably its most important function right now. This should be the main feature of the budget talks with the Legislature. Compounding the economic uncertainty right now are the federal minimum wage increases and the likely passage in this election year of a local labor “reform” bill that promises more jobs to locals in the private sector — which will die quickly once this horrible measure is shoved down the throats of the already gasping businesses.
Where is this “pro-business” administration’s dramatic economic revitalization plans? During the budget process, the Legislature can take the opportunity to study the economy in depth, take public suggestions, and come up with an economic rejuvenation plan. To let this opportunity slip by is to leave economic recovery in the hands of an administration that has shown little capacity to move forward.